Undoes Quotes & Sayings

Oh, the jealousy, the greed is the unraveling. It's the unraveling and it undoes all the joy that could be.
. — Joni Mitchell

His grin widens, and leaning down, he undoes the tie. — E.L. James

It's the Longing that ultimately undoes you. When it finds you, it gnaws at your bones and tugs at your chest. It fills you up inside like rot and makes you dream dreams and it drowns you. The Longing keeps you in bed, clutching at your sheets while the world goes on outside. It smells like old leaves and cigarette smoke, mixed with the scent of far-off places you will hear of, but never see. It's the gloss on a lover's lips the moment you realize you will never kiss those lips again. It is the bittersweet, unrequited love of creation and it will break your heart again and again and again. If you know the Longing the way I do, then these words are redundant. We understand each other perfectly, you and I. — Matthew Sturges

I don't know why, but nobody undoes me like you. You want to know why I ran from you for a month? That. That right there." He traced the tip of his nose along Elijah's. "I'm done running. — Heidi Cullinan

How is it that with everything that's happened in my life, this girl is going to be the thing that undoes me? — Katja Millay

Love does as it undoes. It goes after with equal tenacity: joy and heartbreak.
Her happiness was his unhappiness and that's the unfair way it was. — Jandy Nelson

Alas! the small discredit of a bribe Scarce hurts the lawyer, but undoes the scribe. — Alexander Pope

Invade me now, my ruthless friend,
And make me cower in the dark.
Remind me that I'm all alone
And draw upon my face your mark.
How is it that you capture me,
When all my thoughts deny your force?
Is it the reptile in my brain
That lets your terror run its course?
Baseless Fear undoes us all
Despite our quest for lofty goals.
We would-be Galahads don't die,
Fear just freezes all our souls.
It keeps us mute when feeling love,
Reminding us what we might lose.
And if by chance we meet success,
Fear tells us which safe route to choose. — Arthur C. Clarke

I don't know what most people mean when they use the word love. If they haven't contorted their lives around a hope sharp enough to bleed them empty, then I think they're just kidding. A hope undoes what tiny pride you have, and makes you thankful for the undoing, so long as it promises another hour with the person who is now the world. Maybe people mean attractiveness, or affection, or pleasantness, or security. Like the nonbelievers in church who enjoy the hymns or go for the sens of community, but avert their eyes from the cross. I feel sorry for them. They are dead before their time. — Adam Haslett

Of course none of those men was suitable. Half were
after your fortune, and as for the other half - well, you
would have reduced them to tears within a month."
"Such tenderness for your youngest child," Hyacinth
muttered. "It quite undoes me. — Julia Quinn

Legislation must be passed which undoes the damage caused by excessive de-regulation. That means reinstalling the regulatory firewalls that were ripped down in 1999. — Bernie Sanders

It was right and wrong both. Love does as it undoes. It goes after, with equal tenacity, joy and heartbreak. — Jandy Nelson

Government control gives rise to fraud, suppression of Truth, intensification of the black market and artificial scarcity. Above all, it unmans the people and deprives them of initiative, it undoes the teaching of self-help ... — Mahatma Gandhi

You and I, Mia. We have needs that must be attended. I will look after yours, and you will look after mine." He sighs, and his fingers move to his suit jacket and deftly undoes the buttons, letting it fall open to reveal a smart black shirt and tie underneath. "I've waited for this moment for so long. — Claire C. Riley

Chaos doesn't do, it undoes. — Jonathan Carroll

Love? Be it man. Be it woman.
It must be a wave you want to glide in on,
give your body to it, give your laugh to it,
give, when the gravelly sand takes you,
your tears to the land. To love another is something
like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief. — Anne Sexton

Some seek pleasure in love
blind to the trials of a mortal body
others see a bubble or mirage
and realize impermanence undoes us all
a real man's will is straight like iron
in an uncrooked heart the Way is true
dense and tall bamboos in the snow
show you the mind not used in vain — Han-shan

A man cannot conceal joy," I said, though I wasn't sure where it was coming from, "because joy undoes deceit. What I have, I will share, because I must. There is no other choice. — Kristina Meister

Goodness that preaches undoes itself. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It does not undo harm to acknowledge that we have done it; but it undoes us not to acknowledge it. — Mignon McLaughlin

She undoes a clasp on her golden gown and it falls to the floor. She's beautiful. The half of her that's covered in skin. The rest looks like Thanksgiving leftovers a couple of days past their prime. — Richard Kadrey

Great art suspends the reverted eye, the lamented past, the anticipated future: we enter with it into the timeless present; we are with God today, perfect in our manner and mode, open to the riches and the glories of a realm that time forgot, but that great art reminds us of: not by its content, but by what it does in us: suspends the desire to be elsewhere. And thus it undoes the agitated grasping in the heart of the suffering self, and releases us - maybe for a second, maybe for a minute, maybe for all eternity - releases us from the coil of ourselves. — Ken Wilber

Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds. — Rachel Carson

[ ... ] love is not reasonable or measured. It undoes you. It's in the imperfections in each other, in ourselves, where we find our humanity. It's in our dents and scars where the deepest connections are made. Real love resides in the parts of me I think no one wants to see. — Liza Palmer

Dialectical logic undoes the abstractions of formal logic and of transcendental philosophy, but it also denies the concreteness of immediate experience. To the extent to which this experience comes to rest with the things as they appear and happen to be, it is a limited and even false experience. It attains its truth if it has freed itself from the deceptive objectivity which conceals the factors behind the facts that is, if it understands its world as a historical universe, in which the established facts are the work of the historical practice of man. — Herbert Marcuse

The feel of arms around me, in comfort rather than as restraint or in harmful intent, undoes me. I cry for all the years of mocking and teasing received at the hands of my peers, for having been born to hateful, careless parents. I cry for the fact that this one good, kind boy has joined the game. And That makes me think it's hopeless to find any goon in anyone, which only makes me cry harder. — Cindy C. Bennett

One does not remember one's own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us — Anna Funder

I probably wouldn't be a good spokesman for an electric car, because I'll still get on a private jet, and one flight on a private jet undoes all my electric-car good deeds. — George Clooney

If pain sometimes shatters the creature's false self sufficiency, yet in supreme Trial or Sacrifice' it teaches him the self-sufficiency which really ought to be his - the 'strength which, if Heaven gave it may be called his own': for then, in the absence of all merely natural motives and supports he acts in that strength, and that alone, which God confers upon him through his subjected will. Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God's, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it. In all other acts our will is fed through nature, that is, through created things other than the self - through the desires which our physical organism and our heredity supply to us. When we act from ourselves alone, that is, from God in ourselves - we are collaborators in, or live instruments of creation: and that is why such an act undoes with 'backward mutters of deserving power' the uncreative spell which Adam laid upon his species. — C.S. Lewis

If I were asked to name the deadliest subversive force within capitalism
the single greatest source of its waning morality
I should without hesitation name advertising. How else should one identify a force that debases language, drains thought, and undoes dignity? If the barrage of advertising, unchanged in its tone and texture, were devoted to some other purpose
say the exaltation of the public sector
it would be recognized in a moment for the corrosive element that it is. But as the voice of the private sector it escapes this startled notice. I mention it only to point out that a deep source of moral decay for capitalism arises from its own doings, not from that of its governing institutions. — Robert L. Hellbroner

He stands up, slowly, and puts his hands on the zipper of his jeans, where I notice there's a bulge that looks like someone stuck a cucumber in his pants. That can be his ... thing, can it? He undoes the button then his fly and then slides his jeans down. He's wearing those tight boxer-briefs things, like that guy in the Calvin Klein commercial, and I realize, it's definitely not a cucumber. — Sarah Darer Littman

The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before. — Hannah Arendt

Still kneeling, he grasps my foot and undoes my Converse, pulling off my shoe and sock. — E.L. James

Marla tells me how in the wild you don't see old animals because as soon as they age, animals die. If they get sick or slow down, something stronger kills them. Animals aren't meant to get old. Marla lies down on her bed and undoes the tie on her bathrobe, and says our culture has made death something wrong. Old animals should be an unnatural exception. Freaks. — Chuck Palahniuk

Each of us has a creation tale - how we came into this world. And I'll add this: each of us has an uncreation tale - how our lives came apart. That which undoes us. Sooner or later, it will claim you. Mark you. More than your creation. — Michael Hainey

If the state - and within the state, the judiciary particularly - harasses and undermines the Church , in any society the state undoes itself. — Russell Kirk

The new vantage from which Christian theology as a discourse on Christian identity must operate in the modern world, then, is the Christological horizon of Mary-Israel. To be Christian is to enter into this horizon. But where is the horizon concretely displayed, where is it made visible if not in despised dark (and especially dark female) flesh? Is this not the flesh of homo sacer . . .the flesh that is impoverished, "despised and rejected of men," flesh that in shame we "hide our faces from" (cf. Isa. 53:3)?
But if this is the case, it follows that the poverty of dark flesh is where one finds the wealthy God. . . In (Christ"s) taking on the form of the slave, the from of despised dark (female) flesh there is the diclsoure (sic) of divinity, a disclosure that undoes the social arrangement of the colonial-racial tyranny (tynannos,), as the seventh-century theologian Maximus the Confessor called it, that is the darker side of modernity — J. Kameron Carter

Nothing, in truth, can ever replace a lost companion. Old comrades cannot be manufactured. There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories, so many bad times endured together, so many quarrels, reconciliations, heartfelt impulses. Friendships like that cannot be reconstructed. If you plant an oak, you will hope in vain to sit soon under its shade.
For such is life. We grow rich as we plant through the early years, but then come the years when time undoes our work and cuts down our trees. One by one our comrades deprive us of their shade, and within our mourning we always feel now the secret grief of growing old.
If I search among my memories for those whose taste is lasting, if I write the balance sheet of the moments that truly counted, I surely find those that no fortune could have bought me. You cannot buy the friendship of a companion bound to you forever by ordeals endured together. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

It's a truism that denials never quite catch up with charges. Honest journalists who may have mistakenly printed false information know that the most prominent retraction never quite undoes the damage done by the original publication. — Tom Wicker

No accumulation of good, no matter how vast, undoes an evil; no rescue of the future, no matter how successful, undoes a murder in the past. — Timothy Snyder

It is hope, not despair, that undoes us all. — Jennifer Donnelly

Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. — Frank Morton McMurry

I wonder if there's a secret current that connects people who have lost something. Not in the way that everyone loses something, but in the way that undoes your life, undoes your self, so that when you look at your face it isn't yours anymore. — Nina LaCour

the very thought of being with you undoes me, — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come. — Pico Iyer

There is only one thing I fear now-love. For I have seen it and I have felt it and I know that it is love, not death, that undoes us. — Jennifer Donnelly

I feel lucky to be getting older. The fact that I made it to 30 and then 40 was big enough. So I can't get too down on getting older; otherwise, it kind of undoes everything I've fought for. — Sam Taylor-Wood

In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built and what one has established another undoes. In mathematics alone each generations adds a new story to the old structure. — Hermann Hankel

She wears a cape, and it is this that undoes her - that allows her to be pulled, limbs light and poised as a cat, from her horse. — Madeline Miller

Freeman's theory helps to explain how love and plasticity affect each other. Plasticity allows us to develop brains so unique in response to our individual life experiences - that it is often hard to see the world as others do, to want what they want, or to cooperate. But the successful reproduction of our species requires cooperation. What nature provides, in a neuromodulator like oxytocin, is the ability for two brains in love to go through a period of heightened plasticity, allowing them to mold to each other and shape each other's intentions and perceptions. The brain for Freeman is fundamentally an organ of socialization, and so there must be a mechanism that, from time to time, undoes our tendency to become overly individualized, overly self-involved, and too self-centered. — Norman Doidge

For I have seen it and I have felt it and it is love, not death, that undoes us. — Jennifer Donnelly

The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world's greatest events are not produced, they happen. — Georg C. Lichtenberg